Tel: +(213) 740 9220 Web: http://neuroinformatics.usc.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page Email: arbib@usc.edu

Professor Michael Arbib has led international research in computational neuroscience for three decades. He is Professor of Computer Science, as well as a Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC).

The thrust of Michael Arbib’s work is expressed in the title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics (McGraw-Hill, 1964). The brain is not a computer in the current technological sense, but he has based his career on the argument that we can learn much about machines from studying brains, and much about brains from studying machines. He has thus always worked for an interdisciplinary environment in which computer scientists and engineers can talk to neuroscientists and cognitive scientists.

Tel: +(858) 534-1147 (office) Web: http://crl.ucsd.edu/~elman
Email: jelman@ucsd.edu

Professor Jeffrey Elman is a cognitive scientist with expertise in linguistics. He is Founding Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind and Dean of Social Sciences at UC San Diego.

His primary research interests are on language processing and learning. He studies language both through computational models and also through psycholinguistic and neuroimaging studies.

In his early work, he was interested in speech perception, and what the mechanisms are that make it possible for humans to perceive complex acoustic inputs with such apparent ease.

Professor John O’Keefe is a neurophysiologist and Fellow of the Royal Society who has extensive experience in all aspects of rodent navigation and its neural bases. His seminal book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map (O’Keefe and Nadel, 1978) underpins the empirical directions for the conceptual mapping research. He is at University College London.